His name is Khan

Sitting in Christmas ice-cold Berlin, with just a few hours to go before My Name is Khan was to release in Mumbai, Shah Rukh Khan decided to open a bottle of wine in the Regent Hotel room and share it with friend and director Karan Johar. After a sleepless fortnight, it was a time for re

Sitting in Christmas ice-cold Berlin, with just a few hours to go before My Name is Khan was to release in Mumbai, Shah Rukh Khan decided to open a bottle of wine in the Regent Hotel room and share it with friend and director Karan Johar. After a sleepless fortnight, it was a time for reflection, and how even as the 60th International Film Festival of Berlin was getting ready to have him grace the red carpet for the screening of My Name is Khan and greet the enthusiastic cheering of 20,000 fans, there was a cloud hanging over its release in Mumbai. Mumbai, the city where in 1991, Khan had come to settle to make something of his life.

Actor Shah Rukh Khan

A city where the Shiv Sena was protesting against his remarks on how humiliating it was to see no Pakistani players selected for the IPL. A city where his posters had been defaced, his effigies burnt, and his patriotism questioned. A city where threats were pronounced that would overshadow his heart-stopping performance in the film as Rizvan Khan, a cosmetics-salesman-cum-repairman who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome, and whose life changes dramatically after 9/11.

Released this weekend, the film, which is exuberant but simplistic in parts, has quickly made $19 million worldwide in the first weekend, making it the biggest Shah Rukh opening in India as well as the biggest Bollywood opening weekend in the UK and the US. More than that, his unbending stand against the Shiv Sena made watching My Name is Khan a badge of honour for anyone who believes in a more liberal India.

Shah Rukh, Kajol and Karan Johar at the Berlin Film Festival

Having stood his ground, though, Shah Rukh has not even had the time to say "yippee". Partly because of physical exhaustion, given a gruelling schedule that has seen him go from Nasdaq in New York to the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi, from London where he appeared on Jonathan Ross's Friday Night show to Berlin where his billboards stand alongside movies such as Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. And partly because of the emotional pressure of being with friends and family, trying to answer the unspoken question: "Why did you have to make that comment on TV?"

It couldn't have been easy dealing with the Sena's viciousness, which ranged from a Saamna editorial asked him to "go to Karachi and Islamabad to play cricket with the Pakistanis" to Uddhav Thackeray comparing him to Ajmal Kasab when he said, "Kasab and Shah Rukh are the most secure people in Mumbai."

Gauri and Suhana Khan at INOX, Mumbai

It is a trial that Johar feels has added weight to his stardom. "When an icon is a combination of good looks and goodness, talent and strength of character, he becomes more substantial," he says.

Such heroics were, however, not on Shah Rukh's mind when he started preparing for the role of Rizvan, a character who turns into a Forrest Gumpian folk hero while journeying across the States and attempts to make America see the errors of stereotyping Islam. Rizvan's journey takes him from the 30,000-strong town of Banville in California to the 204-strong village of Wilhelmina in Georgia.

Shiv sainiks set fire to a MNIK poster in Moradabad.

Shah Rukh read books, watched documentaries, met two youngsters suffering from Asperger's Syndrome, recorded himself in character, watching himself onscreen in his bathroom-cum-video projection room, and even followed a man with the disorder around San Francisco for two days. It was a role without any crutches of stardom. There was no star gaze, because Rizvan has trouble looking people in the eye. There was no flamboyant walk, as his character tends to hop like a penguin. There were certainly no outstretched arms, the signature Shah Rukh gesture seen in countless songs. It was also a film that tackled a difficult issue, even if in a somewhat naive manner.

Shah Rukh has always taken pride in being a deeply secular Indian as well as a good Muslim. His religion may be something he assumes with cosmopolitan ease but it is certainly one reason why he is embraced so warmly in the Middle East, Indonesia and Malaysia. For Johar, it was a film he felt he was capable of making, one his Lahore-born late father would have been proud of.

Shah Rukh and Kajol in My Name Is Khan

"He was 40 years older than I was. He wasn't the kind of father who took me to the park or played sports with me, but he told me his stories of life before the Partition. How some of his closest friends and dearest neighbours had been killed. I still remember him watching PTV throughout the day in the years before satellite television," says Johar. For Shah Rukh, it was a chance to break the shackles of stardom and further develop his skills as an actor which began with Swades. The 80-day shoot in the US and the subsequent 20 days in India gave him an opportunity to exist in the "true world of the film" and become Rizvan.

In Germany, after the film was premiered at Berlinale, it was talked of in the same breath as Howl and The Ghost Writer, by Rob Epstein-Jeffrey Friedman and Roman Polanski respectively, films dealing with paranoia. Ironically, paranoia on a large scale greeted what Shah Rukh thought to be an innocuous comment on Pakistani cricketers.

"When an icon like Shah Rukh takes a principled stand, people rally around him. This was proved when Mumbai stepped out in huge numbers to watch the film."KABIR KHANDirector, New York

Though he may now try and make light of the situation--"just because I'm paranoid, it doesn't mean no one is following me"--it has been a difficult and fraught fortnight. When the first protest broke out, both he and wife Gauri were out of Mumbai. "My mother-in-law, a very sweet and strong lady, was at home with my children. So was my sister but I was still anxious," admits Shah Rukh.

It was a time, says Johar, not to be overemotional but pragmatic. What worried both the most was whether people would be safe going to the theatres. Would the aggression against the film translate into attacks on audiences?

Shah Rukh was also being constantly questioned in New York, London and back home about what he had actually meant. The question asked was whether we should be friends with people who have killed our own. And the other more troubling question was on his identity as an Indian.

"But it defines who I am. My father would always tell me your mother may have given you birth, but I gave you India." His father's freedom fighter's tamrapatra is lying in a trunk with his papers with relatives in Bangalore and he intends to reclaim it soon.

The controversy captured the national imagination like a daily reality drama, making minor celebrities of people such as Sena spokesperson Neelam Gorhe who emphatically said that support "does not only mean giving shelter to terrorists, it can also be given in terms of moral backing" and allowing commentators to treat Rahul Gandhi's Mumbai visit as a spectator sport.

Even as Shah Rukh was constantly on Twitter, addressing his audience directly, sometimes apologising to fans for "disturbing sentiments", at other times saying how tired he was of "interpretations of this whole undesired and sad affair", the film industry remained largely silent, having often suffered in the past at the Shiv Sena's hands. Some spoke up though and enthusiastically, like Kabir Khan, whose New York sparked off 9/11 as the big new Bollywood movie idea.

As he puts it, "When an icon like Shah Rukh decides to take a principled stand on something, people rally around him which was proved last Friday when Mumbai stepped out in such huge numbers to watch the film despite the threats." Sociologist Dipankar Gupta goes a step further, calling the Sena power monsters and bullies, adding that it was high time someone spoke up against them.

"His biggest challenge was to break the shackles of stardom and emerge as a character. This will enable him to complete the transition begun with Chak De! India."KARAN JOHARDirector, My Name is Khan

The realms of real and reel have now unwittingly become blurred. Rizvan Khan's message appears to be Shah Rukh Khan's message. In the film, when Rizvan attacks the bigot in the mosque for misinterpreting Islam, it may well suggest his own questioning of the Sena's fundamentalist stand on what makes a good Indian.

When Rizvan stands up in a Georgian church to sing "We shall overcome" in the new circumstances, is he assuring himself through the crisis, albeit without the Broadway musical touch? Just in the same way that his prolonged interrogation at Washington D.C. airport last year resonates in the first, quite stunning, scene of the movie.

At the end of the day, it was all about a movie whose theme is both universal and yet specific to India. If, for Johar, it was a chance to get out of the pigeonhole that people have put him in as director, for Shah Rukh it was an important test of his acting skills. A chance to challenge the assumption that "isko itna hi aata hai (that's all he knows)".

"I hate talking about acting, because it is always in the rhythm of the movie." If Om Shanti Om was an electric guitar note of madness, then in My Name is Khan, he was playing a "neuro-atypical mind, who could do less and say more," he says.

His own somewhat "neuro-atypical mind" is now ready to fly, literally, in tights and cape, as a superhero in next home production, Ra-1, which, because of spiralling costs, he has decided to film in England rather than in the US. Short of actually playing cricket, Shah Rukh also hopes to encourage his team to win the IPL this season.

Nothing seems impossible now for the man called Khan.

--with Nishat Bari and Sumaiya Khan

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